Field of the Invention and Description of the Relevant Art
The present invention relates to an endoscope image recording system for compressing and recording endoscope image data.
Recently, there have widely been used endoscopes of which elongate insert sections are inserted into body cavities to observe organs or the like related with the body cavities, and which permit a variety of medical treatment using appliances inserted through appliance channels as required.
There have also been practiced electronic endoscopes in which solid imaging devices such as CCD's are provided at the respective distal ends of the endoscope insert sections.
In some cases, endoscope images picked up by such electronic endoscopes or TV cameras connected to the eyepiece sections of fiberscopes are not only observed by TV monitors, but also recorded on image recording apparatus for later diagnosis or analysis. When recording endoscope images like such cases, there arises a problem of requiring a memory unit with large capacity because the image data contain a large quantity of data. Another problem is in that when transmitting the image, the transmission speed becomes slow.